Journal Entries

Saturday, June 09, 2007

Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam: The two gate changes and additional delays don´t seem to faze the middle aged man who sits across from me, decked out in his purple shirt, white pants secured by a wide, black belt that proclaims ´Pure Performance´ in large white letters and is deeply immersed in his porno magazine. I, on the other hand, can barely keep my eyes open having just survived three nights in Amsterdam. Thoughts from this fine city...

The Dutch are quite fond of their coffee, as evidenced by the seemingly endless number of coffeeshops scattered throughout the city.

They take their bar closings very seriously in Amsterdam. The minute the clock strikes one o´clock in the morning, everyone is kicked out the door and the lights are off within 5 minutes. (If people don´t start moving towards the door at closing time, the staff start letting everyone know that they, "don´t intend on staying late that night")

Bikes are very big in the Amsterdam transportation scene. Crossing the street often involved looking for bikes, cars, trains and buses, all in the same road space and coming from all directions. Thankfully, I survived without being impaled by someone´s handlebars.

Our hostel accommodations were pretty good, with one exception. Any time we had to take a shower, we were forced to play ´Beat the Drain´. For some reason, after the first night, the drain in the shower failed to remove water from the shower basin in anything resembling a timely manner, so it became a real challenge to bathe without A) flooding the bathroom floor, or worse, B) flooding the entire room.

Finally, the Dutch are doing amazing things with junk food. This place is a [junk] foodie´s paradise. One night, we decided to just pick up random things from a variety of street shops. Our meal consisted of pomme frittes with ketchup and spicy chile mayonaise sauce, hot dogs that were dressed up like pizza ( i.e. hot dog bun and hot dog as base, then covered with tomato sauce, cheese and choice of toppings), we followed that up with a deep fried waffle that was dipped in chocolate and then a couple hours later, had some falafel. Kuato failed to enjoy the variety of that outing.